So, as I've kinda done in the past for things like The Hunt and such... I figure I'd do a review of the Halloween Event AKA "The Stones"/Adamastor. I especially want to do this because, at minimum, I just want to say it was great. Not perfect, but great, and this sort of thing is exactly what's needed to invigorate the game periodically.
Obviously this is going to contain spoilers, so if you don't want them, seriously, stop reading.
In Summary (tl;dr)
The Halloween Event (which I'll refer to as "The Stones" from now on) was a really well done event, with the right amount of mystery, puzzles and sneaky-finds which an event like this needs to have. The use of local Galnet news for placing a clue, and a bit of deductive reasoning on the galnet articles (e.g travelling at sublight speeds for =~ 200 years, with a trajectory passing these three systems allowing you to guess at a 200LY distance in a rough bearing) meant the areas to search were well indicated, but still general enough to require a good amount of searching. (The Good)
Unfortunately, the whole thing was critically torpedoed by the social media "Binary" message which pretty much circumvented the whole thing, and allowed me to (with some luck) land on the correct planet where the whole event culminates, before the event even went live. But more on that later (The Ugly).
There's a few other bits and pieces where the event hit non-critical issues with long-standing bugs, but I'll talk about them more later too (The Bad).
Putting aside the binary message though, this was a really good and well-prepared event, and I hope the people involved have learned a few things to make the next one even better!
How the event (should have) played out
Ignoring the social media binary message for a bit, the first clue was an alert about a "ghost ship", the Adamastor, arriving in the Chukchan system. The ship had been travelling on autopilot at sublight speed for the past 200Ly on a trajectory that had it go past the HIP 61595, HIP 64011 and HIP 65201 systems.
A scan of the Adamastor's log gives some vague clues about where it had been travelling 200 years ago. Meanwhile, for the first time in a while, a local galnet article appears is in the Chukchan stations, with some clues about the original flight details of the Adamastor before it became stricken, revealing it set out towards Barnard's Loop, travelling past the HIP 39748 and HIP 33386 systems, with enough fuel to travel 370Ly.
This all combines to give two leads and some information
If you follow the original flight path, you come across a listening post which yields a cryptic message. You decode the message (by keeping every 8th character, noting an issue in "The Bad") which further describes location of the target system you're after; 615 LY away, Body 3, and a longitude for a planetary base (with the latitude provided in the Adamastor's logs). Critically though, there's nothing to suggest Coalsack as the direction of travel; so at this point you have a range, but no trajectory, to the system described on 30th October in the logs.
If you follow the reverse route, you can find a crashed sidewinder on a planet with a log from Professor Carver, giving insight into what befell the Adamastor, and whose only clue is a nebula 300Ly away. This fairly easily leads to the coalsack... but using the information in the LP allows you to find the target system; Musca Dark Region PJ-P B6-1 in the Coalsack Nebula.
Arriving in the system, when you scan Body 3, you'll find barnacles, a "crashed SRV" featuring a barnacle and an Interceptor doing it's thing with the barnacle, as well as a Thargoid Ship Wreck, and the geological base. The crashed SRV just provides a small cash award of =~ 1m credits, while the geological base contains a bunch of records detailing what transpired. I won't detail it here as it's not really relevant to the review, suffice to say it's some interesting logs with the usual awesome voice acting this game offers (Moar of this plox!)
How it actually played out
FD published a series of binary message fragments to their social media in the leadup to the event. In short, this basically named the Coalsack Nebula in it, which lead to everyone and their dog flying countless FCs and ships to the Coalsack nebula (the end-game of this puzzle) before the extended downtime happened.
I did this as well, and picked a system in the middle of the coalsack. So had a bunch of other FCs, so I figured "well this is too obvious"... based on the audio message from Dr Murphy given in FD's social media I basically went "It's probably Thargoids, where's the nearest system with an Ammonia world"... this gave five or six systems in the region, so I went to the closest, which happened to be Musca Dark Region PJ-P. I scanned the system, and went to the first nearby landable planet I spotted, which just happened to be Body 3.
So when downtime finished, I was not only in the right system, but on the right planet. I think the game was up at 1pm GMT, I was logged in 1:10pm, and got my act together to make the post at 1:20pm... and at that point it was just backtracking to work out how we're meant to work out this was the place. So yeah, the binary message really torpedoed this
So, a bit more analysis and suggestions...
The Good
The Ugly
That binary message pretty much ruined the whole thing. Thanks to that, you had people swarming the vicinity of the final destination, and with a little up-front deduction I'd already picked the right system (and if it wasn't right, I planned to check all six systems out, so it wouldn't have taken long). It really shouldn't have pointed to the Coalsack.
But I get it... social media, hype, that sort of thing. So the binary message should've said "CHUKCHAN", the start of the mystery, or "ADAMASTOR", the subject of it. People here love to wrap the tinfoil tight, so that would've sufficed. Maybe they thought "Oooh, we're obscuring it so it's all mysterious and hidden"; BINARY IS NOT MAKING SOMETHING SECRET. I get not everyone knows Binary, but you could've achieved the same effect writing the message in, say, German; a non-majority of the player base might know that language, but those who do will recognise it instantly. So either, the binary needed to encode something way less spoilery, or it should've used a puzzle with a much, much higher bar of difficulty.
But I'd err simply on not spoiling your whole plot like that. The log snippet from Murphy would've been enough to get the tinfoil rolling.
...But it wasn't a dealbreaker!
This was a great event, and everyone I've dealt with who took part enjoyed it, and are looking forward to where this and all the ongoing story arcs are going next. Since FCs launched and Space Legs was announced, I've pretty much not been playing. But the return of Galnet, CGs and these kind of events are what have dragged me back. Hopefully future events will use more of the sexy mechanics you have in this game, more areas of space, and more things besides just Thargoids. Looking forward to it!
Obviously this is going to contain spoilers, so if you don't want them, seriously, stop reading.
In Summary (tl;dr)
The Halloween Event (which I'll refer to as "The Stones" from now on) was a really well done event, with the right amount of mystery, puzzles and sneaky-finds which an event like this needs to have. The use of local Galnet news for placing a clue, and a bit of deductive reasoning on the galnet articles (e.g travelling at sublight speeds for =~ 200 years, with a trajectory passing these three systems allowing you to guess at a 200LY distance in a rough bearing) meant the areas to search were well indicated, but still general enough to require a good amount of searching. (The Good)
Unfortunately, the whole thing was critically torpedoed by the social media "Binary" message which pretty much circumvented the whole thing, and allowed me to (with some luck) land on the correct planet where the whole event culminates, before the event even went live. But more on that later (The Ugly).
There's a few other bits and pieces where the event hit non-critical issues with long-standing bugs, but I'll talk about them more later too (The Bad).
Putting aside the binary message though, this was a really good and well-prepared event, and I hope the people involved have learned a few things to make the next one even better!
How the event (should have) played out
Ignoring the social media binary message for a bit, the first clue was an alert about a "ghost ship", the Adamastor, arriving in the Chukchan system. The ship had been travelling on autopilot at sublight speed for the past 200Ly on a trajectory that had it go past the HIP 61595, HIP 64011 and HIP 65201 systems.
A scan of the Adamastor's log gives some vague clues about where it had been travelling 200 years ago. Meanwhile, for the first time in a while, a local galnet article appears is in the Chukchan stations, with some clues about the original flight details of the Adamastor before it became stricken, revealing it set out towards Barnard's Loop, travelling past the HIP 39748 and HIP 33386 systems, with enough fuel to travel 370Ly.
This all combines to give two leads and some information
- The ship logs describe the systems of interest you're looking for given by the trajectory clues, of which you have two potential routes to track:
- Follow the original flight path of the Adamastor, towards the Barnard's loop sector near HIP 39748 and HIP 33386, looking for the system described in the ship log detailing 28th October 3111, approximately 370Ly away from Chukchan; OR
- Follow the Adamastor's flight path in reverse, looking approx 200Ly away from Chukchan, on a trajectory passing near HIP 61595, HIP 64011 and HIP 65201, looking for the system described in the ship log detailing 31st October 3111.
If you follow the original flight path, you come across a listening post which yields a cryptic message. You decode the message (by keeping every 8th character, noting an issue in "The Bad") which further describes location of the target system you're after; 615 LY away, Body 3, and a longitude for a planetary base (with the latitude provided in the Adamastor's logs). Critically though, there's nothing to suggest Coalsack as the direction of travel; so at this point you have a range, but no trajectory, to the system described on 30th October in the logs.
If you follow the reverse route, you can find a crashed sidewinder on a planet with a log from Professor Carver, giving insight into what befell the Adamastor, and whose only clue is a nebula 300Ly away. This fairly easily leads to the coalsack... but using the information in the LP allows you to find the target system; Musca Dark Region PJ-P B6-1 in the Coalsack Nebula.
Arriving in the system, when you scan Body 3, you'll find barnacles, a "crashed SRV" featuring a barnacle and an Interceptor doing it's thing with the barnacle, as well as a Thargoid Ship Wreck, and the geological base. The crashed SRV just provides a small cash award of =~ 1m credits, while the geological base contains a bunch of records detailing what transpired. I won't detail it here as it's not really relevant to the review, suffice to say it's some interesting logs with the usual awesome voice acting this game offers (Moar of this plox!)
How it actually played out
FD published a series of binary message fragments to their social media in the leadup to the event. In short, this basically named the Coalsack Nebula in it, which lead to everyone and their dog flying countless FCs and ships to the Coalsack nebula (the end-game of this puzzle) before the extended downtime happened.
I did this as well, and picked a system in the middle of the coalsack. So had a bunch of other FCs, so I figured "well this is too obvious"... based on the audio message from Dr Murphy given in FD's social media I basically went "It's probably Thargoids, where's the nearest system with an Ammonia world"... this gave five or six systems in the region, so I went to the closest, which happened to be Musca Dark Region PJ-P. I scanned the system, and went to the first nearby landable planet I spotted, which just happened to be Body 3.
So when downtime finished, I was not only in the right system, but on the right planet. I think the game was up at 1pm GMT, I was logged in 1:10pm, and got my act together to make the post at 1:20pm... and at that point it was just backtracking to work out how we're meant to work out this was the place. So yeah, the binary message really torpedoed this
So, a bit more analysis and suggestions...
The Good
- Voice Acting was on-point as usual. I know it takes effort, but this stuff is great. Even the bit of extra voice acting in areas like conflict zones and stuff just adds that depth. Combined with the galnet player, it really makes it atmospheric to play the logs while exploring the site.
- Puzzles were the right difficulty. There was a logical path to get to the Coalsack, at which point you could start combing it, and the LP really just provided that bit extra to pinpoint where you needed to go. The LP puzzle itself was good, because it was a simple solution as usual, but gave everyone the runaround to try and work it out. It lasted about a week, which is a good time for something like this. Probably wouldn't work a second time, but oh well.
- Use of assets was great. This used a lot of different assets and capabilities, which is something I'm always on about. FD have some great mechanics in this game... they need to be front-and-center of experiences like this.
- The short story was genuinely good and well structured. If I hadn't just started at the end, I would've been really itching to find the geological survey site
- Good open-ended outcomes. What does it mean now that the Thargoids were discovered before 3125? Where was the Adamastor heading after stopping at Musca Dark Region? What happened on the 28th October 3111 that got scrubbed? Who were Azimuth, and did they already know about Thargoids?
- Can't hatchbreak megaships. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, FIX THIS. You put a "ghost ship" along with mysterious hints about things in it's cargo hold. Of course anything of interest was destroyed, but people will still look and... oh dear... hatchbreaking megaships doesn't work anymore. This is a pretty egregious problem. One day, you're going to put a megaship in with some cargo you need to break out to further a plot point, and it won't work. This is a basic thing that should work.
- Typos in cipher text: The LP message got a thorough combing once it was noticed that the word "WEST" which appeared in the scrambled LP text was incorrectly localised as OUEST. There was also a stray whitespace in the LP message causing the decode to be offset. It still worked-ish, but it really could've spannered the puzzle.
- Mislabelling of things: When the event first went live, the Crashed SRV appeared like this
Not a dealbreaker, but it's just another case of "Is it a bug? Or is it deliberate?" which ED is so often plagued by - Narrative inconsistency: A lot of people got hooked up on the start of the voyage, noting the Adamastor had fuel supplies for a 370LY journey at the start of the leg, which was the clue to travely 370LY. But then they went a further 615LY? How? There was no refuel facility, so maybe they could refuel organically, but if they could, why note they had 370LY of fuel in the first place? I get this was meant as a clue, but it helps to make sure that little bits of info like this don't clash with the narrative.
- Use of already-explored regions. Part of what made my shortcut work was searching known, explored systems. Having a large region of explored space suddenly have barnacles, shipwrecks and a geo survey site from 3111 present suddenly appear is very jarring. I keep hearing these permit-locked regions like Regor, the Barnard's Loop region, Cone sector, and beyond, are for future content... they've been that way for many years now, so where is this future content? It would be much better if you started using these areas for things, particularly if exploration is involved. This might grate against whatever you currently have planned, but I have a hard time believing there is a plan for these regions when we've got 6 years in the game without a single one being unlocked (and indeed, more areas locked as time goes on)
The Ugly
That binary message pretty much ruined the whole thing. Thanks to that, you had people swarming the vicinity of the final destination, and with a little up-front deduction I'd already picked the right system (and if it wasn't right, I planned to check all six systems out, so it wouldn't have taken long). It really shouldn't have pointed to the Coalsack.
But I get it... social media, hype, that sort of thing. So the binary message should've said "CHUKCHAN", the start of the mystery, or "ADAMASTOR", the subject of it. People here love to wrap the tinfoil tight, so that would've sufficed. Maybe they thought "Oooh, we're obscuring it so it's all mysterious and hidden"; BINARY IS NOT MAKING SOMETHING SECRET. I get not everyone knows Binary, but you could've achieved the same effect writing the message in, say, German; a non-majority of the player base might know that language, but those who do will recognise it instantly. So either, the binary needed to encode something way less spoilery, or it should've used a puzzle with a much, much higher bar of difficulty.
But I'd err simply on not spoiling your whole plot like that. The log snippet from Murphy would've been enough to get the tinfoil rolling.
...But it wasn't a dealbreaker!
This was a great event, and everyone I've dealt with who took part enjoyed it, and are looking forward to where this and all the ongoing story arcs are going next. Since FCs launched and Space Legs was announced, I've pretty much not been playing. But the return of Galnet, CGs and these kind of events are what have dragged me back. Hopefully future events will use more of the sexy mechanics you have in this game, more areas of space, and more things besides just Thargoids. Looking forward to it!
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